SCG News

Abstract

Object inspectors are tools that allow developers to explore the state of run-time objects. This exploration creates many interaction events between the developer and the inspector. Recording, saving and using those interactions directly in an inspector opens opportunities to reduce the amount of repetitive actions developers need to do during development and debugging. To make this possible we propose an inspector model that records developer interactions as first-class entities and uses them to reduce repetition. This is enabled through a model that uses a tree to keep track of an inspection session, and a recording infrastructure that allows each widget to decide how user interactions should be recorded. To validate this model, we identify several types of problems that can arise in object inspectors and show how they can be addressed if developer interactions are recorded by the inspector. For example, the new model allows developers to replay inspection sessions, restore partial navigation and generate code from an inspection session.

Abstract

Autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition influencing a person’s social interaction, communication and sensory perception. Autistic people tend to need a certain level of structure and routine and can often be overwhelmed in day-to-day situations. The fact that autistic people experience the world differently and have different needs than the non-autistic majority often leads to misunderstandings and even conflict situations. So called autism id cards aim to help in such situations, where communication between those unfamiliar with autism and autistic people fails, as well as to raise awareness in general. Their usefulness is, however, limited by the fact that the autism spectrum is rather broad, and the explanations on the cards are very general. This project wants to build on the idea of autism id cards by developing a digitalized, personalizable version of them. It consists of a web app where autistic people can click and write together one or more personalized infographics and make them available to the people they choose through an automatically generated link, or save them on their phone. The project is iteratively developed in partnership with the psychiatric department of the hospital of Frutigen, Meiringen, Interlaken. The input of autistic adults, parents of autistic children, friends and caretakers as potential users is taken into account at various stages of the development through surveys and usability testing. Through the modularity of the infographics and the free text options in each module, the possibilities for personalization are endless. At the same time the preformulated statements, and the example infographics that can be used as a starting point for customization, provide enough guidance for users not to get lost. While the end result is not yet ready for large scale public use, it is a solid proof of concept with extensive functionality.

Abstract

Most of the static analyzers are monolithic applications that define their own ways to analyze source code and present the results. Therefore aggregating multiple static analyzers into a single tool or integrating a new analyzer into existing tools requires a significant amount of effort. Over the last few years, we cultivated Renraku — a static analysis model that acts as a mediator between the static analyzers and the tools that present the reports. When used by both analysis and tool developers, the single quality model can reduce the cost to both introduce a new type of analysis to existing tools or create a tool that relies on existing analyzers.

Abstract

Growing numbers of applications interacting with each other facilitate the need to share data between various systems. The interconnected applications used to manage immigrant and asylee need the same reference data in order to consistently fulfil their purpose. This thesis examines the used replication mechanism requiring direct database access and proposes an improved design. By analysing the situation and validating alternative replication mechanisms that adhere to the defined architectural standards it was possible to propose two realistic approaches, one of which is already in development. A proof of concept using a message oriented middleware showed that extending the architecture concept might even be more future-oriented.

Abstract

Although software developers are usually reluctant to use static analysis to detect issues in their source code, our automatic just-in-time (JIT) static analysis assistant was integrated into an Integrated Development Environment, and was evaluated positively by its users. We conducted interviews to understand the impact of the tool on experienced developers, and how it performs in comparison with other static analyzers. We learned that the availability of our tool as a default IDE feature and its automatic execution are the main reasons for its adoption. Moreover, the fact that immediate feedback is provided directly in the related development context is essential to keeping developers satis ed, although in certain cases feedback delivered later was deemed more useful. We also discovered that static analyzers can play an educational role, especially in combination with domain-specific rules.